"I died for beauty, but was scarce / Adjusted in the tomb, / When one who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room."

In her lifetime, Dickinson was viewed as an eccentric recluse with an unusual gift at poetry. She would send poems to friends as "flowers," but less than a dozen of her poems appeared in print during her lifetime (anonymously, and some possibly unauthorized). Upon her death in 1886, Dickinson's sister Lavinia discovered a chest full of verse. Nearly half of them were bound in forty fascicles, little booklets sewn together by Dickinson herself. All told, there were nearly 1800 poems.

Dickinson's reputation as "the Myth," the odd woman in white, persisted: no one in the family believed there would be an audience for these poems except Lavinia. It was at Lavinia's request that Mabel Loomis Todd became involved, one of the few friends of the family with a deep conviction of the importance of the poems. They also approached Dickinson's old friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but he "did not think a volume advisable — they were too crude in form, he said, and the public would not accept even fine ideas in such rough and mystical dress" (Todd, November 1889, quoted in Sewell, 220). Nevertheless, Todd persevered, showing Higginson some of her favorites and obtaining a commitment to "look them over" if she organized them. Todd is often justly criticized for her editorial overreach (especially in punctuation and capitalization), but as Richard B. Sewell notes, "without the spiritual kinship she [Mabel Todd] felt with the poet and with the poems we might have had no poems (or letters) at all" (219).

The poems were rejected by the first publisher Todd and Higginson approached, Houghton Mifflin, who called them "queer — the rhymes were all wrong" (Sewell, 221). The next publisher, Roberts Brothers, agreed to take on the project if the family paid for the plates, issuing POEMS in 1890. The Second Series followed in 1891, and the Third Series in 1896. Until 1914, these were the only published collections of Dickinson's poetry.

These publications, later printings but issued before 1914, retain all the quirks of poems' complicated publication history: the titles supplied by Higginson, the smoothed out bits by Todd, the organization of poems into topics like "life," "love," and "nature." They retain the iconic cover design of early variants — in especially fresh condition, the bevelled edges of the cloth boards sharp, the grey shade bright and clean. An unusually lovely set of early editions from this distinctly American voice.

Read more: Sewell, The Life of Emily Dickinson.